Medicine: Anesthetizing the Devil

From the Middle Ages, when sticks were used to "beat the devil" out of
mental patients, through the middle '30s, when electric and insulin
shock therapy began, physical treatment of the insane relied on rude
methods. Even now, shock "cures" may be worse than the disease: they
often fail to cure, and sometimes the patient breaks a jaw or crushes
his backbone in violent, convulsive spasms.

Last week the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene announced that
it had developed a gentler way of bringing on the coma which seems to
relax sufferers from manic-depressive states. The...